Married couples of the aristocracy needed an heir and a spare, but unmarried, aristocratic women were expected to stay virgins. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy could be disastrousβa woman could easily be exiled from her home so as not to taint the reputations of her female relatives.
Yet even when unmarried, aristocratic couples in historicals rarely use preventatives. Clearly, some must know about it, yet they rarely help their lovers out here. Sure, many men of the period would not have, but they are supposed to be heroes. In short, everything around how the risks associated with sex are dealt with in the genre. How do you feel about the way not just historicals but also contemporaries, paranormals, and SFR handle these subjects?
For me birth control in novels is often unsexy. Jennie: I am pretty much on the same wavelength as Layla. Mentions of birth control can take me out of the moment. Sometimes in contemporaries those mentions feel shoehorned in to me, or even a bit performative.
Megan Hart had a contemporary where the heroine puts the foil condom packet between her teeth, sinks down and uses her hands on the hero, then takes the packet out of her mouth and rolls the condom down his shaft herself.
She was slinky, confident, comfortable with her body and his. I like that. It speaks well of the characters to consider these things. Jayne: In contemporaries, I want some mention of birth control. Jennie: I find exchanges of testing information even less appealing β both characters somehow have always been tested recently and come out negative for venereal diseases.
